This discovery so horrified me in its extremity of unremitting torture on so many levels - Liesel's sheer unrelenting fear throughout and beyond four years' near total sensory deprivation knowing that if the wretched man died or became sufficiently disinterested this would mean slow death either by asphixiation or starvation not only for herself but later including her responsibility to safekeep her family - that I feel guilty at my voyeurism just thinking clearly about the human themes thrown into sharp relief. But let's celebrate that there was also hope and love and warmth in her tenacity looking after, informing and educating her family in that bleak environment with pictures on the bathroom wall and discussions about the real world albeit in supernatural disguise. I see much to admire in her caring and ingenuity through necessity, maintaining cognitive efficacy whilst somehow keeping her sanity and pouncing on the one opportunity in 24 years (!) to smuggle a note to the doctors that they should be so very careful with her daughter and perhaps consider her abstruse sentences in the round. For she had to be so cautious lest her father become spooked or angry enough to kill her, flee and leave the others buried, that I believe the note had to be anodyne. All this forethought took so much presence of mind that I thoroughly admire her nerve and enduring human capacities throughout so much despair during their decades of ghastly incarceration.

Whilst utterly eclipsed by the real events, I think it can be useful to face up to some of your questions in general. You ask whether we can recognise sociopaths. I would reply that perhaps we can learn to do so through behavioural evidence and communication always with the proviso that these apparent signs are checked and rechecked. Experiences are a private matter so we can just watch and listen for anomalous versions of normality, whatever that is, or compare them with our own outlook, only when the person feels on safe ground to be reporting their intentions and feelings fairly truthfully.

How could we tell when they are feeling safe enough to do so? Well, my experience in the psychological field points to the cautiously respectable method of listening to emphasis of subject matter, emotional loading, plus their reactions to our own subtle cues in response - as I find it amply demonstrated that people are usually looking for immediate personal feedback rewards of one sort or another, quite often below the threshold of the ostensible conversation. Is this sounding a little abnormal in itself? Well, the trouble is that short of observing foul deeds or their result, we are shifting contexts beyond the simply physical realm of direct empirical testing. Where narrative and imagination rule, logical certainty is not the order of the day but rather suggestion needs to be questioned with further probing. It's pretty much all you can do, observe and test through questioning or waiting to see.

If the overwhelming demand seems to be to impress with power or to shock, that's noteworthy as something of an early warning. But I'm not advocating thought crime! Not all monomaniacs or bores are oppressors and people frequently show off to release tension rather than have to act on it, so are we any the wiser? This is where it becomes a political matter, we can only decide in law whom to watch or record after an offence of course. But on a personal basis, yes, I think people can learn to spot individuals with generally unempathic histories of ruthless operation as distinct to merely powerful efficient qualities and then err on the side of distance.

You ask if we perhaps project our own qualities onto others rather than apprehend them well and I would say that in normal conversation that is what we may often be doing in as much as we are socialising to seek agreement and further, to be understood as quite normal in our vagaries when we chat. Talking to anyone, you may not be on the alert as to their possible sociopathy! Odd world that would be, if we were all suspicious all the time. To avoid these extremes, it's really a question of noticing rather more if something leftfield jumps into the proceedings, rather than pushing that back under the carpet because it would be uncomfortable to consider. In keeping, in discussions and debates, attention to issues ought to be more rigorous and so we ought anyway to aim for less intrinsic bias and project less values onto colleagues. But I think you'll still see it creeping in!

Are we all capable of sociopathy? According to this thesis above, we mostly do all have the basic tools - cognitive, emotional and engineering skills born of brain and body relating to the world to become any of many personality types. Genes may play a role. More so I think constraints and successes growing up, in education, business and marriage etc. culturally embedded would obviously have a very large bearing.

But this brings me full circle. If that is so, how did Liesel manage to stay so together, apparently adjusted and benign rather than emulate her grotesquely effective father? Indeed, was he privately seen as so effective, or did she understand he was (quite possibly) mad (for one thing, even just logically look at the seeds of the fantasy's destruction being inbuilt, as wasn't it obvious that someone would get seriously ill, sometime, and he had no plan for that and to forgo contraception too seems very odd - quite aside from the whole damn plan's concrete elements and plotting being inhumanly machinelike in their relentless execution)? I did just ponder, did this second family perhaps recognise at some very slightly encouraging level that he was actually also a shallowly needy figure, wearing his toupee for visits, a bit pathetic even, whilst holding the keys to freedom and that here was some slight leeway for adjusting their dungeon to meet one or two immediate needs? It's too horrible to dwell on, yet dwelling under there is just what these strong minded unfortunate people had to do to survive for so long, living in slender hope.

I did note that Leisel referred to Heaven as the world above maybe literally, maybe qualitatively for herself and allegorically for her children, with comforting references to a better God ruling a far better place which they could see on TV. Straightaway, I wouldn't have wanted to wish that we didn't have such a concept to draw on in such circumstances, you can feel how powerful such exciting power at near remove might be when you are truly powerless. Perhaps we can only question superstition because we have sufficient degrees of freedom? I am not sure that I see a need with our epistemic advantage for there to be any actual literal dualist extra dimension to being human. Rather, I feel your question about this kind of factor could fall under some discussion of top down feedback from imagination, narrative, planning possibilities for handling an uncertain world, in contrast to the pragmatic bottom up causal flow we then manipulate. More importantly overall, now that Kerstin's life is out of immediate danger in the hospital, I'm jumping up and down for Liesel, Kerstin, Stefan and Felix's human endurance that they have survived their ordeal!